COVID-19 memes going viral: On the multiple multimodal voices behind face masks

Abstract

Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the dissociative echoing of individuals wearing peculiar masks or the dissociative parodic echoing of their collective voice. The theoretical thrust of this analysis is that, as some memes are (re)posted across social media (sometimes going viral), the previous voice(s) – of the meme subject/author/poster – can be re-purposed (e.g. ridiculed) or unwittingly distorted. Overall, this investigation offers new theoretical and methodological implications for the study of memes: it indicates the usefulness of the notions of multimodal voicing, intertextuality and echoing as research apparatus; and it brings to light the epistemological ambiguity in lay and academic understandings of memes, the voices behind which cannot always be categorically known.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Taboo: Interaction and Creativity in Humour

“…Much has been written about the use of disaster humour as a psychological way to cope with uncertain and scary events, such as the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 (Oring, 1987) and the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack (James, 2015). In a similar vein there have been a few related recent studies concerned with coronavirus pandemic including a large scale psychological study of coronavirus humour perception in Italy (Bischetti et al, 2021) and a discourse analysis study of face mask memes (Dynel, 2021). However, our focus here is rather different from most studies of disaster humour, as we are interested in the interactive dynamics of humour, rather than psychological functions or motivations.…”

Internet memes related to the COVID-19 pandemic as a potential coping mechanism for anxiety

“…To that end, the use of humour has been examined as a potential coping mechanism in relation to the current pandemic [26][27][28][29] . In the Italian general population, Bischetti and colleagues 28 found humour related to the Covid-19 pandemic was generally perceived as aversive.…”

“…Expanding on perceived humour, the role of internet meme use has also been explored in relation to the current pandemic 27,29 . Typically, internet memes depict humorous social commentaries that are contextually relevant to a particular demographic of individuals 30 .…”

“…They have become a vital aspect of digital culture which are largely well established in the media by consistently maintaining current references that often step into cultural and political domains 31 . Dynel 27 performed discourse analysis on a set of Covid-19 memes speci cally related to mask wearing which were shared on social media webpages. The content of these memes was predominately related to use of peculiar household items to create homemade masks; and beliefs surrounding the e cacy of mask use.…”

“…Here, memes based on images of public places were largley focused on extreme or peculiar masks and out ts that were presumably used in a preventative way, whereas self-taken images often depicted humour orientated mask parodies. Finally, many of the memes were shared virally, with the initial images being used to create various iterations 27 . Hussein and Aljamili 29 examined the perceived humour and mood improving perception of memes and caricatures related to the Covid-19 pandemic amongst a sample of the Jordanian population.…”